Prometeo
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
An unflinching reckoning with the traumas of one’s life and those inherited through a history of exacted injustices
“Some men find nothing, and others / find omens everywhere,” writes C. Dale Young in Prometeo, a collection whose speaker is a proverbial “child of fire.” In poems that thrive off of their distinct voice, the speaker confronts generational and lived trauma and their relationship to his multi-ethnicity. We are presented with the idea of the past’s burial in the body and its constellatory manifestations—both in the speaker and those around him—in disease and pain, but also in strength and a capacity for intimacy with others and nature. Grounded in precise language, Young’s examination of the past and its injuries turns into a celebration of the self. In stark, exuberant relief, the speaker proclaims “…I was splendidly blended, genetically engineered / for survival.” Resilient, Young’s poems find beauty in landscape, science, and meditation.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The contemplative fifth collection from Young (The Halo) explores the places and lineages that provide the raw materials for self-invention and subsequent reinvention. Like the flickering flames of Promethean creation, Young's poems challenge concepts of uniformity, revealing them to be fleeting and illusory. "Fractured, divided to the quick, I am incapable// of being singular," he writes of his own ancestry. Young engages with the history of the Caribbean, Europe, and Mexico, a history that is tied to deeper, often hidden realities: "We are of this dirt. We cannot/ be killed off, the old women say. And in the base pairs/ of our DNA, we discover the truth. One can hide/ many things, but the truth is always there." There is a strong connection between identity and place in these poems, which Young traces in the language of nostalgia and familiarity: "Alone/ on the soft sand, the surf mumbled the old language./ Like my great-great-grandmother who visits me/ in dreams, it said: Salt or no salt, trust no one." Young powerfully maneuvers through complex issues of multiethnicity and heritage in direct poetic language, inviting readers to immerse themselves in the many truths his collection reveals.
